When you buy a loaf of bread in the shops you've already paid for part of it - let me explain.
At the RSPB’s arable farm in Cambridge, Hope Farm, we farm the land productively and efficiently for food but have also doubled the numbers of farmland birds over the last 10 years. We’ve been able to do this by using our knowledge of birds and their needs and benefitting from payments from environmental schemes that are open to all UK farmers (though the details differ in each UK country). By belonging to the English Entry Level Scheme we get paid for creating beetle banks, creating skylark patches in the middle of fields, creating nectar-rich wildflower field margins and managing the hedgerows well. As a result, yellowhammers, skylarks and linnets have increased dramatically in numbers. And the cheque that we get from the taxpayer (so thank you for contributing!) comes to a little over £5000 per annum for our 180ha of land. Now there are about 4 million hectares of broadly similar arable land across England growing wheat, barley, oilseed rape etc and if all these farmers were doing the same as we are then farmland bird numbers would be on the up and up – but they aren’t. Is this because farmers haven’t joined the schemes? Partly – because the coverage in England for all the environmental schemes is about two thirds of eligible land but if two thirds of farmland is already in the schemes and yet farmland bird numbers keep bumping along at a depressingly low level what's going wrong? Why aren't the environmental schemes as effective on the average farm as they are on the RSPB’s farm? There could be many explanations but I think it comes down to the fact that not all farmers are bird experts - some are, but certainly not all!
At Hope Farm we have paid great attention to providing the 'Big Three' needs of farmland birds - insects in summer to feed to young birds, seeds to provide energy to get through the winter and safe nest sites. And it has worked, so that's why we invite lots of farmers to come and see what we've done, and advise us how to do better, and why we have a network of farm conservation advisors across the UK to help more farmers do even more for wildlife.
We are proud to work with about 4000 farmers a year who are making real contributions to wildlife recoveries like we do at Hope Farm yet, whatever the explanation, the schemes are not yet delivering enough birds on the ground to allow the Westminster Government to meet its target of halting farmland bird declines by 2020. With this amount of money it should be very easy to do much better much quicker! No doubt the Treasury will have its eyes on the environmental scheme budgets in future unless they are tweaked to be more effective.
But then again, maybe not, as the environmental payments are small beer in the big scheme of things - even in the big agricultural scheme of things. For Hope Farm we get another cheque each year from the taxpayer - this one replaces the subsidy payments of the old days but is essentially a payment from the taxpayer (thank you again for contributing!) to farmers for being farmers. This cheque is a big one - just under £32,000 per annum! We get six times as big a payment for being farmers as we get for being wildlife-friendly farmers - that seems a bit odd! And provided we stick to the law, the big cheque will keep arriving every year however well or badly we farm.
Agriculture is still a heavily subsidised industry - like almost no other. When you buy a loaf of bread you've already paid for some of it through your taxes. But farming is unique in that as well as the products it can sell (like bread) it provides lots of things that we value - landscape, access to the countryside, drinking water, wild flowers, bumble bees and the song of the skylark. That's the main justification for continuing to put so much public money into agriculture. But only if those public benefits are delivered?
Your comments would be appreciated - from farmers and non-farmers alike.